Thursday, 12 January 2012

This one picture I think tells the entire story about what is happening in Second Life. The project of Second Life is clearly in trouble, but it has left a large reserve of skills that produce interesting virtual spaces, even when it is just a mass void for sale.

Second Life has experienced the closure of a lot of SIMs. So the effort the generate a kind of cyber Empire made up of regions, Republics, and Kingdoms which were to be united in a single Empire of Linden Labs, a purely economic Empire where Linden Labs got rich by providing a platform which was to support millions of users, and a planet of virtual land to extend as vast as a planet, and perhaps even larger than a planet.

Well the great Empire Dream of Linden Lab is dying out. That is not to say that virtual reality is dying, its just that right now the Second Life project is getting smaller and smaller.

But its interesting to see what is surviving. As for activity the universe of SL is becoming more and more dominated by sexual play. Which should not really be surprising. The Internet almost always gets flooded with porn, after all what would you really want to watch on TV? But its interesting to not the kinds of SIMs that seem to survive.

I have notice that the SIMs that survive are not only sexual, but also often Gorian or medieval with castles and AVs wearing Barbarian outfits. It is almost like Second Life is entering a Dark Age, a world dominated by closed inbred communities, castles, and barbarians.

The collapsing SL looking more and more like Western Europe in 800 AD as imagined on the History Channel or some B rate pulp novels. Does this mean anything? Is it the way the players imagine decline? Is it a social reality of declining social structures that they becomes fragmented, paranoid, and feudal, or is it the case that this kind of fantasy play which has always had the great appeal?